Update: I was unfortunately not aware of Shamus Young's severe criticism of Fallout 3 available here to link in the original piece and I regret that. It dovetails rather nicely with what I've written and it's much better executed than my piece. I strongly recommend anyone...

Post Apocalyptic Mayhem Review

Explosive lawn flamingoes FTW...

Post Apocalyptic Mayhem or P.A.M. for short seems like it's stuck in time. Remember the days where car combat games were awesome and original? Like ten years ago? That's the window P.A.M. tries to re-open and even though it does try to sprout some sort of personality, it's extremely limited and bare-bone content will be sure to make you leave it in the dust of an atomic desert.

Apparently, the apocalypse has taken place yet again and what else would the survivors do other than race crazily modified cars to the death? Yes, you've probably seen this sort of premise in games before, be it Twisted Metal or Vigilante 8, or even in a movie like Mad Max. The gist with which P.A.M. tries to carve out its uniqueness - and utterly fails - is that racing is not about finishing in first place, but killing the most enemies.

The only game mode to speak of is the aforementioned race to the top of leaderboard of the 'most kills' over the course of five-minutes. They do try to throw in an extra mode in form of a tournament that glues the three tracks back-to-back if you can stomach doing the same thing over and over three times in a row.

Killing your opponents is pretty much the only redeeming part of P.A.M. You get to pick from six relatively different cars. Regardless, each of the cars has its host of weapons that are picked up during the race in a similar fashion to Mario Kart and its clones, by running into barrels. My favorite car, by far, has got to be the Meth Alchemist. Even though the world has ended, people are still worried about cooking up meth and this alchemist is ridiculously overpowered. One of its main weapons is a backward-explosive flamingo launcher that absolutely devastates if used in closed spaces.

The track selection is pretty limited as well. Granted, the world is destroyed, but hell, they could've worked more than three track options into the mix. From the boring-looking devastated city to a truly deserted desert and a colorless beach, you're forced to run ad nauseam through incredibly uninteresting locales that don't help shake the feeling that this game was thrown together hastily to meet a release date and could've benefited from a lot more work in content.

Speaking of nausea, you're probably guaranteed to get sick of playing this game online. The only game mode available in single-player makes a return for multiplayer and thanks to the overly aggressive computer-controlled characters and the already barren selection of games online, you're bound to be racing by yourself, rarely seeing anyone else, while the A.I is busy killing itself in the lead.

Trying to mix things up is a commendable effort, but P.A.M. just comes off as a lazy attempt to revive a previously saturated genre. If there were more tracks and game modes, there could've been a much better game to speak of here. As it stands, Post Apocalyptic Mayhem is a ridiculously overpriced download that you should not waste your money with.